The record shows only that they have not admitted to basing their opinions on their religious beliefs. See my humorous post to Bricker, in which I claim to have every desire to not strike something from the OP, but claim that I had no such power. Pure BS, of course. I’m sure Thomas and Scalia, with a lifetime of writing judicial opinions, are much better at it than me.
I really don’t mind being called a bigot if people honestly think I am posting in a bigoted manner. I only hate it when it’s used as a cheap rhetorical device. It’s such a handy rhetorical device that it’s hard to resist, though.
yes. If
- You don’t believe your opponents statements are backed up by any evidence, you askd for a cite
or
- If you don’t have an argument but disagree with your opponent’s ideas, you ask for a cite, whether it’s warranted or not. Then if it’s provided, you dismiss it as coming from an inadequate source.
(For the record, not a lot of that has happened on this thread, but it happens a lot in GD).
More relevantly, does anyone think our opinions will have any bearing on whether or not Roberts in confirmed? Bricker, we’re just practicing having opinions against the distant day when they might conceivably matter to those in power. We’re citizens in a democracy debating the issues of the day, even if we have no direct power over those issues. This is kinda the point of that whole First Amendment thingie. If relevance in the real world were key to GD, we might as well fold up the tent now.
Perhaps you have experience of other message boards where things are different?
You want to connect some dots? How about the almost total lack of support you’re getting in this thread, even from liberals and atheists? What does that tell you about the tenebility of your position?
Has Kerry changed his position as a result of this movement? And has he been excommunicated? No? Then what does this prove, exactly?
Is Judge Roberts a part of the Vatican? No? Then what does this prove, exactly?
Well, Republicans do suck, I’ll give you that, but most Republicans are not Catholics. So, once again, what does this prove, exactly?
Yes, that is precisely what bigoted thinking is! Scalia and Thomas are scum because they’re scum! Not because they’re Catholic! Imputing their poor moral character to their religion is bigotry! That’s what the word means!
Sure! Notice it all you want. Noticing doesn’t make you a bigot. It’s the conclusions you’re drawing that make you a bigot.
Why, I bet some of your best friends are Catholics!
Yeah, there are a bunch of Catholics who are very liberal. And there are a bunch of Catholics who are very conservative. What does that tell us about the effects of Catholicism on a person’s politics? It indicates to me that it doesn’t have much fucking meaning at all. To think otherwise is, once again, bigotry.
What’s so innately stupid about all this is the fact that Robert’s Catholicism has nothing to do with his nomination. He got the post because of those conservative views. If he had the opposite views, Bush would’ve nominated someone else. So why the fuck are you harping on about his religion, when what you clearly have an issue with are his politics? If Roberts were an atheist with exactly the same political views, would you be moaning about the influence of atheism on the SC? If he were a Jew, would you be muttering dark warnings about “the three Jews in the SCotUS?” No? So why do Catholics get a double standard? And don’t give me that hierarchical religion bullshit, as it’s trivially easy to prove that Catholics are under no particular aegis to agree with Rome.
Please believe I am being entirely sincere when I tell you that this is the most nakedly bigoted thread I’ve seen since the last Strmfrnt invasion.
Some of the cites that I’ve provided address those issues in part. I don’t accept the notion that I have to provide cites for whatever you think I do to make my point.
So no one wants to join me in the current pile-on. Can’t say I blame them.
That their are people in leadership positions in the Catholic church who want to influence politicians (and judges in important positons like the SC, presumably) and who are actively trying to do so.
My preview screen isn’t pulling up this quote for some reason, so I can’t respond to it at present.
Goes directly to what has become the topic of much of this thread: People are using the “bigot” card to discourage an examination of Roberts’ religious beliefs … all over the place … it seems. Kinda thought provoking, eh?
No, Scalia and Thomas are scum because they’ve disappointed me in so many of their decisions over the years. Read that third quite about them that I cited … they think it’s OK for guards to beat a shackled man so badly that it breaks his bones. They’re scum. Maybe you’re OK with that. I’m not.
Play the bigot card much?
Because I think his religion, or rather, his specific brand of Catholicism, is what has in part made him the kind of conservative he is, and that Scalia and Thomas are the same kind of Catholic conservatives, and they are scum.
And a nice close with the bigot card. Well, you’re consistent, I’ll give you that.
JP2: “Well, Clarence, Nino, now that I have you on conference phone, did you get the decisions I faxed you?”
Scalia: “Yes, Your Holiness. But are your aure about this? I mean,m why can’t I just declare that a fetus has rights at conception?”
THomas: “Yes, Holiness, and why does the decision you wrote for me say I should call sodomy laws silly? I was all set to write a fire and brimstone denunciation of the homosexuals. I was all set to say they’d burn in Hell forever.”
JP2: “No, no, no, you fools! Don’t you realize how essential it is to have plausible deniability? You MUST distance yourselves from me, or pretend to at least. You must PRETEND that your decisions have nothing to do with me- even though, of course, I am your Lord and master.”
Thomas: “Brilliant, Holiness! Why, it’s no wonder they call you infallible!”
Scalia: “You’re a genius! No one will ever see through our little ruse.”
Except Evil Captor. He’s so clever! Only HE would see through such as fiendish plot!
Cite?
Right, because there’s a huge shortage of ouspoken posters with martyr complexes on this board. C’mon, don’t give me that “silent majority” crap. You’re all alone on this one because most people can see what your saying for what it is, and want no part of it.
And who are not succeeding, and who have no history of success, and who never will succeed. But that doesn’t stop you from using them to tar an entire creed.
Maybe if you’re new to the practice, it is.
Yeah, I’m okay with Scalia and Thomas. When I call them “scum,” I mean it affectionatly.
I play 'em as I see 'em.
What is his specific brand of Catholicism? Try to be… y’know… specific.
Apparently, I can’t say the same for you.
You just don’t know what you’re talking about, is the only problem. The Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion is absolute. It’s official position that capital punishment is unwarranted in most circumstances is not an absolute declaration that the death penalty is morally unacceptable in all circumstances. And, you still haven’t established your initial premise that “above all” the Church is about “social justice” as opposed to the greater glory of its Creator and the salvation of its members. And, you haven’t established that a member or clergyman has to trumpet every element of what you trendily conceive of as “social justice” in order to believe that he is doing the good works to which the faithful are called.
Aha. So one instance is reduced to “Now when we go for Sunday Mass we hear homilies . . .” Hmm. Homilies having remotely political content amount to . . . at most 10 out of the 300 homilies I have heard in Catholic churches in the U.S., Europe, and Asia in the past five years. Of these, a good four were liberally slanted (e.g., talking about the need for debt relief or African famine aid). One or two were about the civic obligation to vote. Another three, maybe, were about the Respect Life theme. What’s your sample size? If it’s as minimally anecdotal as I suspect, perhaps you shouldn’t melodramatically have implied that there was a plague upon the land of fulminating right-wing sermons being given across the board (“Now when we go for Sunday Mass we hear” certainly implies a routine, indeed inevitable, trial that the larger body of Catholics are suffering – melodramatic, often?).
You saw this, or Michael Moore told you? Because your track record of distinguishing anecdote and folklore from facts on the ground is limited.
Oh, I was keeping up quite well – I noted when you were attempting to raise the spectre of a nationwide phenomenon of “Republican”-rhetoric spouting priests. We’ve whittled that down to one guy you claim you saw. So, a productive effort on our part.
What you stated caught my interest because it was melodramatic, factually erroneous, and silly. The Catholic Church has not “paired itself” with the Republican Party. Your name-calling toward the Church and Party say a lot about where you’re coming from (the Republican Party “xenophobic?” Bush is trying to legalize 8 million criminal aliens, for God’s sake). The Church and the Party are uneasy bedfellows, at best, on a couple of issues. The Republican Party has far longer-standing and better relationships with the evangelicals and the pro-Israel Jews (both of whom in turn don’t share the entire agenda of the Catholic Church). So, it’s politics as well as religion that you’re not really so acquainted with the details of.
Your disappointment is misplaced. You should be disappointed in your own method of argumentation.
I did not claim that the thread was “rather bigoted” because you “ask[ed]if the guy’s Catholicism could be a problem.” I noted that it was a rather bigoted thread because you opened you OP with the same bigoted rhetoric that was used to attack Al Smith in 1928 was was used, again, (with less success) to attack John Kennedy in 1960. In particular, you posted the following which is such a distortion of Catholic practice as to have been written by Ian Paisley or Bob Jones:
This is not to say that the statement is a clear lie, but it is the sort of distortion that has been used by the extreme Religious Right for years to attack Catholics–particularly by some Protestant groups attacking Catholic politicians in the U.S.
You continue to distort your “evidence” when you cite some nutcase trying to “sue” for Senator Kerry’s excommunication while ignoring the well-publicized fact that the Vatican denies it responded to lawyer seeking Kerry’s excommunication. You made much of the fact that a handful of bishops suggested the Kerry be denied communion, ignoring the fact that the bishops presiding over the rest of the 220 Catholic diocese in the U.S. made no similar claims and that the the actual declaration from the National Council of Catholic Bishops regarding the election addresses many different issues, but makes no statement supporting Bishop Bruskewitz or his like-minded episcopal brethren.
In order to post your OP, you have to begin with a false premise regarding Catholicism and American Catholics–a false premise that has been addressed and debunked on this board in the past. Had it truly been a question, I would not view it as bigoted, per se. However, as a rhetorical question based on a declaration couched in the language of past bigots, proceeding from a foundation of long-disproven error, I do tend to view it as bigoted.
If you wish to attack Roberts on the basis of his conservative views or on some aspect of his judicial philosophy, you are in good company. You might have even gotten away with a thread examining the appropriateness of seating a justice from a particular Catholic tradition. As soon as you start off with the old “puppet of Rome” canard, (as you did) you step into the realm of silliness and bigotry.
In order to demonstrate that your OP has any basis in reality, you should be able to point to some event in history in which
- a Catholic politician in the U.S. was ordered to make a particular judgment (and was punished by the church if he failed)
- the excommunication of Justices Brennan and/or Kennedy
- points in the opinions of Justices Scalia or Thomas that rely on arguments from the Summa Theologica or a papal bull or encyclical instead of precedent in case law or Constitutional law
- or some similar damning event.
If you do not wish your threads to be deemed bigoted, do not rely on the language of bigots to make your case.
That’s funny because this is how his Holiness Pope John Paul II came down on the issue.
Emphasis is mine but you can see that your statement is almost true, just skewed to prove your incorrect point.
You are wrong. What I said was:
What I said was as plain as day. What I wrote in my original post was punctuated with enough “seems” or “I believe” to give you a clue as to this being an opinion piece. Give me a break.
I can’t really decode this. Read some of what our Church has to say about society and social justice. And thank you for necessitating that I look into this because I have discovered what I have known to be right all along.
Again, our late Holy Father,
And finally,
Once again, I merely shared my experiences. I cannot speak for others and was merely expressing concern over the fact that priests shouldn’t mention politics in homilies. As you can see, our Church affords a great difference in political views. As much as I dislike what you have to say, you are still my brother in Christ. I want you to realize this. Melodramatic I know, but it’s the way I feel.
Michael Moore, another Catholic, isn’t that amazing?
I wonder what party those “patriots” at the border carrying guns are? Republicans or Democrats? Which do you think?
Do we need this? I mean, I’m not acquainted with the details? I hope you have learned a little about my views. I just hope that you are defending our Church from a perceived attack and not defending that Party. However, I will have you know, I’m not attacking our Church, I’m attacking those who would use it against what I believe to be its spirit.
Sure, they’re right-leaning. But not because they’re Catholic. We’ve been over this, and many posters, some more articulate than me, have quite concisely pointed out that their decisions have been both incongruent with Catholic teaching, AND with each other’s positions, not to mention very firmly based on a certain reading of the Constitution. It may not be a reading you like, but it’s not Vatican-influenced.
Widely considered? Considered by whom? The Church hasn’t significantly changed its position on ANYTHING in the last forty years.
Let’s see a cite on this. I dare you.
Cite? Oh, and let me remind you that a bishop refusing to give a congregant Communion is not excommunication, since that congregant is perfectly free to seek Communion at another Mass.
So let’s see a cite. Let’s see you provide one instance of the excommunication of a United States politician for supporting abortion.
No, it’s not their Catholicism, it’s their views. So you see another person who holds their views and think, “Must be the religion!” Your problem is, since the other two don’t have very many congruent views, you pick the religion as the common factor. And yes, that’s bigoted thinking.
Just because a lot of people think something, that doesn’t make it correct. This is the best refutation you can come up with? “Other people think so/insert unfunny joke here?” It is to rolleyes.
Then be prepared to accept the notion that people who wish to engage in actual discourse will quickly tire of you.
Oh, and about this…
I’m not sure what it means, or if I should be insulted, but it’s not a road down which you should be walking.
BWAHAHAHA!!
I never knew it was so easy!!
Attention: prayer works to cure all known disease. Also, most diseases may be cured by aligning the appropriate crystals in such a way as to straighten your aura.
Of course, don’t accept the notion that I have to provide cites for whatever you think I do to make that point, either.
My goodness, life in GD just got a lot easier.
Blasphemer!!!
He is God of all things seen and unseen, known and unknown!
Prayer therefore cures all unkown disease as well!!!
You should be excommunicated!!!11!!!twenty-five!!!
Yeah big surprise that Evil Captor chose not to back up his OP with meaningful evidence.
Oh well…at least he has an company in his little corner of bigotry.
Oh, come now. ONe of the oldest tricks in GD is to ask your opponent to spend half his day Googling for cites, then call him wrong because he or she can’t or won’t. Sometimes it’s true that they’re just being lazy, sometimes it isn’t. It’s a matter for the disinterested observer to decide whether or not the request is sound.
Cite?
:wally
But only a couple of the requests for citations have been in regards to tangential issues that have arisen. You have been asked for citations to support the core of your assertion–the stuff that you should have had readily available before you even opened such a thread. In response, you have presented the opinions of a tiny number of people who either believe as you do or believe the things that you oppose without ever showing that the people you oppose have actually performed the actions you fear. Nowhere have you provided evidence that the RCC systematically acts in the ways that you have claimed or that the RCC has ever acted in the ways that you fear. (I will stipulate that you can find such actions–but they will be 200 years old and older and have not occurred in the U.S.)